Inspiration, ideas and information to help women build public speaking content, confidence and credibility. Denise Graveline is a Washington, DC-based speaker coach who has coached nearly 200 TEDMED and TEDx speakers--including one of 2016's most popular TED talks. She also has prepared speakers for presentations, testimony, and keynotes. She offers 1:1 coaching and group workshops in public speaking, presentation and media interview skills to both men and women.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

How important is it, really, to memorize your speech...especially if you will have access to a teleprompter? Just ask U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.

Back when she was a county prosecutor in Minnesota, Klobuchar was tapped to speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the highlight of which was Barack Obama's stirring keynote speech. For her rather less important three-minute speech in the middle of afternoon 3 of the convention, Klobuchar was given a set of rules. She'd be using a teleprompter, and under no circumstances could she make any jokes about then-President George W. Bush. So, given that first proviso, she decided she didn't need to memorize her short speech.

Klobuchar: That was my first national convention and I’m ready to go out there the day before I give my 3-minute speech for John Kerry. I was a prosecutor at the time and he says to me, “Well, have you memorized the speech?” and I go, “Well, no, there’s you know, there’s teleprompters” And he said, “Don’t trust a teleprompter.“ "That is how Carter said Hubert Horatio Hornblower [instead of Hubert Horatio Humphrey] at that the Carter convention."

And I said, all right. It seemed outdated. I’m up there on the stage. Patrick Leahy’s speaking, the teleprompter goes dark. And I’m standing there, I look in the front row and there, waiting for me to speak, is Walter Mondale and I’ve never seen a more “I told you so” look in my life.

I get up to the stage, I give my speech. I don’t use the teleprompter at all, it came up in the middle and, because I memorized it like he said. And it went really well. And the organizers had told me that I couldn’t even use a little joke about George Bush where I said something about…

Klobuchar: That’s right. But anyway, I had a joke, a Barbara Jordan quote, about how what America wants is something as good as its country and a promise as good as its country. And I said, I’d like to end with something famous from someone from Texas and I paused...not George Bush. And they prohibited me from using that joke. And after the teleprompter went dead, I’m like…

Axelrod: So did you use it? Did you ad-lib?

Klobuchar: Yes, I did. I completely ad-libbed because I decided if they were having technological problems…

Too often, I see speakers look at memorizing your speech as something awful--limiting, structured, nervous-making. But Klobuchar learned to see it as freeing her from that nervousness, or the prospect of technological failure...and then freed herself from one of the other rules, while she was at it. I think it's telling, too, that Obama used the same insurance policy on his more prominent speech.